It’s been nearly a year since I started writing for this blog. It’s been nearly a year since my wife went back to work and I had to figure out how to be a stay-at-home dad.
After being asked to write a column for our church newsletter, I thought it would make sense to post a reworked version of that column on the blog, too. You should know that this blog is connected to The Parenthood Journey, a ministry that started at Park Hill United Methodist Church, where my wife and I are members and where our daughter was baptized.
There’s something else you should know: Writing this blog kept me from going crazy.
Parenthood has never been easy, and it started out in traumatic fashion. If not for an emergency C-section, my daughter wouldn’t be alive today, as she had managed to tie her umbilical cord into a knot and wrap it around her neck while still in the womb. It took me a long time to process that horrific moment. At the same time, I was trying to get used to being a new dad. Add to that my decision to drop out of the work force to be a non-traditional stay-at-home dad, and you can imagine the adjustments I experienced.
About three weeks after my wife went back to work, I had a nervous breakdown, or at least as close to one as I’ve ever experienced. I was suffering from a severe cold and sinus infection and this happened to coincide with my daughter’s decision to stop sleeping through the night. I suffered from severe anxiety and a crushing bout of insomnia that I thought would never end.
Feeling out of control in a way I’d never experienced in my life, I sought medical help, started going to therapy and began taking a mild, low dose of anti-anxiety medication. Gradually, I started to get the anxiety under control, and I started to sleep a little better. But I still felt adrift, scared and frustrated by the realities of parenthood, and the reality of choosing to be a stay-at-home dad really hit me.
Just to escape the stress, I started going out by myself on Monday nights. At first, this was about watching Monday Night Football games, because I don’t have cable. Those Monday nights eventually became my refuge, but not because of football.
Not long after I started working through the anxiety, Lauren Boyd and I started talking about a new ministry the church had started, and we discussed ways to reach people outside of church. I had been feeling exhausted and lonely from my days of hanging out with a four-month-old. I felt listless, unmoored from the anchors of a regular job. But the idea of a blog, where I could process my experience of parenthood, and perhaps help other parents do the same, really appealed to me. I started writing.
It started with Eleanor’s birth story. I wrote without stopping for an hour. I edited about three words and I posted it on the new blog. And then I kept writing. And through that writing, I realized that I had a lot to say. And through that writing, I kept my sanity.
This blog has been a blessing. I have enjoyed sharing my parenthood journey, and I hope that it has served its readers as a source of comfort at times and a challenge at others. But most of all, I hope it has been sincere and honest in an age where we doublespeak every idea back on itself until it doesn’t mean anything anymore. I believe parenthood forces us to confront the mirrored selves we present to the world. I don’t believe you can be an ironic parent. That belief is important to me.
A belief in God is important to me, too. And this journey, through the friends I’ve made and the community I’ve become a part of, I’ve realized that God, or at least my receptivity to the search for God, has put me on the path to my better self. Faith in God and in this church home became my anchor in a dark time. The support this blog has provided and the connections I’ve made through the church small group my wife and I started have led me to a much happier, more sane place 15 months into my daughter’s life.
The blog Lauren and I started has been viewed more than 10000 times. We’ve had a number of guest bloggers who have written about everything from breastfeeding to the loss of a child. The blog has been viewed by people who live everywhere from the Ukraine to India to the Netherlands. We hope that it continues to enrich the lives of its readers. I know it has enriched ours.
Thank you.
